2024 Bank Fines Report: How Much Banks Paid For Their Mistakes Globally

Finbold’s Bank Fines Report uncovered that banks paid $4.5 billion in major fines worldwide throughout 2024. 

The country that levied the most was the United States, which ordered banks to pay a total of $4.08 billion—90.67% of the $4.5 billion total—across 19 penalties. 

The United Kingdom took second place, levying the payment of $261.68 million across 10 fines.

These are the biggest bank fines of 2024

The bank fined the most was the Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank), which was fined $3.09 billion due to a multi-agency investigation into improper controls that enabled the corporation’s American subsidiary to launder illicit funds. 

The penalties levied against TD Bank announced on October 10, account for 68.67% of all 2024 fines in the sector.

Furthermore, the most common violation in 2024 was the breach of anti-money laundering (AML) laws and regulations.

The bank that paid the second-largest fine of $348.20 million—JPMorgan Chase & Co—was penalized for ‘an inadequate program to monitor firm and client trading activities for market misconduct.’ 

Interestingly, the relevant violation was ongoing for nearly a decade, from 2014 to 2023. The fine was announced on March 13, 2024.

UK and Sweden follow US in bank fine totals

Elsewhere, British and Swedish regulators enforced the two biggest individual penalties outside the US.

In January 2024, the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) fined HSBC Bank $74.12 million for failing to implement depositor protection. In the last months of the year, Sweden penalized Klarna Bank AB for AML violations to the tune of $46 million.

Klarna is set to conduct its initial public offering (IPO) in 2025 and is expected to remedy its AML situation. However, Erik Blommé, the Director of Sweden’s Money Laundry Supervision, highlighted that the ruling was not an injunction and that, therefore, there is no clear timetable.

US levies 90% of the penalty amount but accounts for only 33% of the fines

Lastly, though the fine sizes in 2024 have been lopsided with the US in a clear lead, watchdogs across the globe have been active. As Andreja Stojanovic, a co-author of the report, pointed out:

“While the US has levied an outsized proportion of the total value of penalties, the share of individual fines imposed in the country—33% with 19 out of the total 57 fines recorded—is more appropriate, possibly even downscaled given the fact the country is home to more than 4,000 banks."

An interesting outlier in the statistics has been China. Despite having the world’s second-largest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), it imposed only three fines in 2024 and, levying a total of $31.22 million, came in behind both Sweden and Finland in terms of the total penalty amount.

Top 10 countries ranked by bank fines total in 2024: